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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the role of personal pronouns we and they in building a community with a shared future in President Xi Jinping’s 61 diplomatic texts from 2013 to 2018. Adopting systemic functional linguistics and positive discourse analysis, the complementarity instead of opposition of the two personal pronouns are discussed under a holistic view with diverse category relations generated through ambiguous use (i.e. inclusion and exclusion) to explain how the community is discursively construed. The “Self/Other” dichotomy is replaced by a cline with we and they intertwined. The wandering use within and across each personal pronoun in the discourse contributes to the construction of the community with a shared future on four different levels, i.e. that for Chinese nation, for two countries, for a region and for mankind, with contextual consideration examined.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The italic form of personal pronoun in this article represents the personal pronoun itself and all its variants, including its nominative, accusative, possessive, and reflexive forms.
2 TreeTagger 3.2.2 can automatically POS tag all words, and the personal pronouns including all their variants of all cases will be tagged as “_PP”.
3 Xi Jinping, in 2016, called on the whole Party to have confidence in its chosen path, guiding theories, political system, and above all to have confidence in China’s culture.